A Rescue Misson

I sit on my best friend's bed weaving a bracelet, and somehow, all of the frustration surfaces again. Maybe it's seeing his bandana on her bookshelf, and maybe it's because I know how much she loves her husband (yet another mutual family term. Her husband and my brother are one in the same). We speak of our mutual frustrated desperation that we feel for him, and how we see the vast potential for him to topple over the edge.

“Is he still taking all of those at once?” she asks at one point.

“No, my boyfriend says he stopped because his tolerance is so goddamn high that they don't work anymore.”

“Oh. That's... good, I guess.”

“Yeah.”

“But...”

“But we know him," I say almost angrily. "I know him. He isn't even going to really stop because he's never solved the problems that make him want the drugs, so he keeps going back to the drugs, and so he never fixes anything.”

We're talking in the same circles that we've been going in for years now—years of wanting him to stop and wishing whatever caused him to hide inside the chemicals could be fixed. I reflect on the fact that when I'm with her, the problem seems more pressing but also more manageable, as if the solution is just out of our reach. I find myself wracking my brain for something—anything—we can do, and I feel like the sentence in my head has progressed even farther from I want to to I have to.

Maybe it's because the biggest reason she loves him is because I made her love him, with stories of faith and hope and love.

It hurts so much to look for words to describe what I lost when I lost him and to find only those three, the three that he taught me in skipped classes and piano covers and poetry. Hope, Love, and Faith. Sometimes it hurts most when I wonder, When did he lose those? When did he go from teaching them to me to losing them in himself?

And I think the worst part is not having answers, because he doesn't tell me like he did, once upon a time, in a room full of holes in its walls, with people who had holes in their hearts, and lives that had holes in their very fabric. We were all full of holes, once upon a time, and now I'm on the other side of the river that rushed by and scared us nearly to death, with all of my holes healed but one—the one that's there because he still carries every single one of his.

I keep running into the same thought, no matter how I start out thinking, so it must be the only answer: We have to do something.

The question is... what?